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Aug. 1, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
19:48
McAdams: The U.S. Should Abandon "Foreign Policy" Altogether

RPI's Daniel McAdams tells students at the 2022 Mises University that foreign policy is central planning at its worst. Government spends billions on corrupt foreign leaders like Zelensky and Americans bear the financial burden and the existential risk. This speech was recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, July 30, 2022.

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Depressed Over Exclusions 00:13:03
So I've been a little bit depressed over the last week or so.
And it's because the Ukrainian government released a hit list of its enemies of state.
And a lot of my friends are on it.
Rand Paul, Colonel Richard Black, you may have heard of him.
Ray McGovern, Jim Jatras, Scott Ritter, Tulsi Gabbard, former representative.
Colonel Doug McGregor.
Glenn Greenwald.
Pretty depressed.
I'm not depressed that they're on the list.
I'm depressed that Ron Paul and I did not make the list.
Because we've been trying.
We've been trying hard and we didn't make it.
So, you know, it's kind of a bummer.
But this is totally normal, right?
Like a country that you've given $60 billion to makes a hit list of public figures of the donor country who have different views.
That's totally normal, right?
That's okay.
It's a plucky little democracy, we've been told.
It's a plucky little democracy that must be supported.
Well, Transparency International, of course, as we knew in New York Times and elsewhere just a couple of months before that fateful day of February 24th, viewed it as one of the most corrupt countries on earth.
You don't see that anymore.
You have to dig in the website for that.
Plucky little democracy, opposition parties have been banned.
The head of the opposition party is jailed.
All non-government media shut down.
Only the state channel is available.
Plucky democracy.
We've sent $60 billion so far, and that's actually technically not true.
All right, I'll get into the reasons for that later, but it just sounds better to say that, so I will.
$60 billion is half of their GDP from 2021.
So as I've said before, we basically bought the country for $60 billion.
And there's a misimpression that the money sent over there, yeah, no one is going to stand here and say war is wonderful, bombs and things are wonderful, blowing stuff up is great.
But none of the money is going to fix the stuff that was blown up or to help the guy with his legs blown off.
As we know, we're all adults here.
It's not naive.
Now, some of it's going over there to bribe politicians because we know they're for sale.
There's no question about it.
And we're no different, but it's more blatant there.
But most of it, as we know, goes to the wealthy in the U.S. By the wealthy, I mean the well-connected, the military-industrial complex, as they're known, the Beltway bandits, the military contractors, the consultants, the think tanks, the media, the media who feature former military who now work for think tanks and consult in defense companies.
This is where the money goes to.
So we're talking about a massive money laundering scheme.
And we're using Ukraine right now as an example because it's on everyone's minds.
You can pretty much put this in any major foreign policy crisis, Iraq, to a lesser degree because we weren't as involved, Syria, Libya, et cetera.
It's a massive money laundering scheme whereby javelins, for example, were sent over, javelin missile.
It's an anti-tank missile sent over by the bushel load to Ukraine.
Not very effective, turns out, in warfare.
Nevertheless, we depleted the supply of javelins in the U.S. arsenal.
So there was an appropriation of $600 million recently to build new javelins, and Raytheon was pretty happy about that.
Worked out pretty well for them.
There are a lot of mansions in McLean that are built and refurbished.
A lot of fancy bathrooms being remodeled on the backs of this war and literally on the blood of thousands who die in this war.
And it's a weird war.
It's a strange war.
The Australian progressive, but in a pretty good way, Caitlin Johnstone, journalist, wrote, she said, this is the most aggressively perception-managed war in history.
And I think she's got that right.
How many of you saw the recent spread in vogue of Zelensky and his wife, the president of Ukraine?
Now, this is totally normal, right?
In the middle of an existential war, you pause to have Annie Leibowitz come over and take some photos of yourself and your wife.
Some of them are literally war pornography, where his wife is in a, I don't know, maybe Jeff knows more about the fashion, beautiful dress, and behind her are rugged-looking soldiers in a burned-out tank or what have you.
Literally, war porn we're seeing in vogue.
Because when you're managing an existential war, of course, you do need to keep up your image.
The president of Ukraine, of course, was an actor who played the president of Ukraine, and his fake party that was on TV became the name of his real party when he was really elected president.
And all of it, of course, was managed by an oligarch, Igor Kolomoyski.
So it totally is the movie Wag the Dog.
It's just right there in front of us.
It's all, again, totally normal.
If you look at the process, what happened first in the immediacy is you purged all the Russian media from the U.S. Literally, YouTube kicked out RT, RT America went under.
It's very, very difficult to find sort of, I would say, mainstream media from Russia.
So you've eliminated in that sense every possible opposition voice in the United States.
And you bombard the population with propaganda about a plucky little democracy that needs to be saved.
Anyone on social media will find themselves banned, disappeared if they disagree with the narrative.
And we know now from people like Alan McLeod and other investigative journalists that the social media, Twitter and Facebook and the others, are chock full of former CIA and NSA and FBI employees.
They're the ones doing the fact checks.
So if you happen to go against U.S. foreign policy, you're disappeared.
If you question the narrative, you're gone.
So you eliminate all competition in ideas.
And what you have left for the majority, unless you're a cranky person who doesn't believe what the government tells you, you have the accepted narrative.
And that's the nature of this particular war.
Well, when did the war start?
Well, February 24th, some ways.
December of 2021, that's when the Russian president sent a proposal to NATO and to Washington, D.C. saying, listen, this NATO expansion is getting out of hand.
You've expanded up to our borders.
You've armed Ukraine to the hilt.
Your bombs and weapons have killed people in eastern Ukraine for eight years.
We need to sit down and have a talk and think about a new security arrangement for Europe.
And they were ignored.
There was no reply envelope, right?
So they didn't reply.
Didn't care.
NATO didn't care.
So you could put it at the end of 2021.
2004, the Orange Revolutions, when the Ukrainians voted for Yanukovych.
The Americans said it was a fake election and overthrew him.
And then he got back into power, of course, in the next election or after the next election.
Or 91, at the end of the Cold War, when a lot of us expected a peace dividend, that's possible.
But in 95, when NATO started expanding in Central Europe.
And you had to wonder why, because the Warsaw Pact disappeared after the Cold War.
Why didn't NATO disappear?
What purpose did it serve?
Well, of course, it was a resting place for failed Scandinavian politicians who wanted to live in Brussels rather than the hellholes they were in.
And you had, for example, people like Victoria Newland, who we know in 2014 was responsible for the Maidan coup, or at least played a major role.
We know because we have the tapes, we heard what she said.
People like Jamie Kurchik and others will claim that she didn't say what she said.
It's a long story, but we know that she said we need to put this guy in office and that guy in office and blank the EU, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, Victoria Newland, as you know, was Dick Cheney's top aide before she went to become one of Obama's top aides.
So this is the neocon world where it doesn't matter who's elected.
That's ridiculous.
It only matters that you stay in power.
And now she has stayed in power.
She is Ukrainian, by the way.
So she's settling a lot of old family scores.
In addition, we have a lot of problems with that, I think, in the U.S. of people who come to this country.
This is my personal view, and bring some of these ancient prejudices with them.
So you have the situation of money laundering, massive scam, $60 billion, and really, I would say, almost unprecedented, except I think COVID was the run-up to that, where you silence all opposition.
Anyone who questioned the efficacy of that beautiful jab was anathema and had to be disintegrated.
Of course, we know now from Deborah Burks that the shot was always crap.
I knew that.
So here's the point.
The foreign policy, and this is something that will ring, I think, true to your ears.
Foreign policy is government central planning, no different than economic central planning.
So all central planning is the problem.
Foreign policy is the Fed with nukes, right?
That's what it is.
And that's the problem.
So free market economists, of course, agree that no central planning of economies.
It always ends in disaster.
It doesn't reflect, as you've heard all week, it doesn't affect people's personal preferences, people's abilities, et cetera.
You know all of this.
And the same is true for foreign policy.
The only free market foreign policy, dot, dot, dot, is no foreign policy.
That's the free market foreign policy.
So we're not talking about cutting around the edges.
We're not talking about, you know, realism and restraint, right?
We're not talking about a responsible statecraft.
No, that's all one version of interventionism.
Free market foreign policy is no foreign policy.
We haven't elected these people to do what they're doing in our name.
They haven't consulted us.
Even if you're dumb enough to vote, I shouldn't say that.
That's not right.
I was just thinking of George Carlin.
But even if you, especially if you vote, you got these guys in, right?
So it's partly your fault.
But the only difference, I think, between interventionist foreign policy and interventionist economic policy is the fear factor.
And that's a big one because you use propaganda.
You know, yes, We feel animated about inflation and we feel anxious, anxiety about inflation, but it's so much easier to ratchet up the fear factor when you're talking about a plucky democracy, when you're talking about Saddam throwing babies from incubators, when you're talking about Gaddafi handing out Viagra for God's sake to his soldiers, right?
Come on.
Or we don't want the, what was it that Condi Rice said?
The mushroom cloud, right?
That's always what they will use.
So the CHICOMs are coming.
Putin is coming.
That's how they get us to acquiesce.
That's how they get Americans to acquiesce.
And it's totally bipartisan, a totally bipartisan foreign policy that relies on this concept that we have the ability and we also are somehow by God given the authority to tell other people how to live, whether they like it or not, whether we kill them or not.
And that's a big problem.
And that's why I've come to the conclusion that the only reasonable foreign policy is no foreign policy.
Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan Visit 00:05:46
There are 50,000 people that work at the State Department.
Do they do anything that any of us in this room want done?
No, they don't at all.
So, and here's the part where I do a, you know, I do a show with Dr. Paul.
So here's our commercial break in a way, but it is related.
And that is, if you're interested in these things, and I hope Jeff will indulge me this, but the Ron Paul Institute does have, on a very smaller scale, the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, and it'll take place in September.
Today is the last day to apply.
So if any of you are interested, there are scholarships available.
It's in Washington, D.C., on September 2nd.
Go to ronpaulinstitute.org for a short application.
But I do, again, I know you're all tired, but the deadline is today.
So here we have it.
So if, as if they're not satisfied with sort of wading into a nuclear, potential nuclear war with Russia, the DC establishment and its bipartisan has now decided that actually that's kind of not enough.
We need to go ahead and get ready for a nuclear war with China.
You guys might be watching this, but Nancy Pelosi has said that she's going to go ahead and visit Taiwan.
And in a perfect world, we'd say, who cares?
But in the real world, the Chinese aren't happy about it.
They know what the purpose is.
The purpose is to own the Chikoms.
That's what it's all about.
So she's going to go there.
She wants to go there.
My personal opinion is that she won't.
But nevertheless, that's what's happening.
The Chinese are obviously not happy about it.
They're angry about it.
They don't like the U.S. getting involved with what China considers its internal affairs.
But to show China who's boss, she wants to plan to fly to Taiwan.
Now, the former editor of the Global Times, which is basically the English language paper of the Chinese Communist Party, he wrote recently, and I think it should be taken very seriously.
His name is Hu Xi Jin.
And he said, U.S. fighter jets escort Pelosi's plane into Taiwan.
If they do, it's an invasion.
The PLA, the People's Liberation Army, has the right to forcibly dispel Pelosi's plane and the U.S. fighter jets, including firing warning shots and making tactical movement of obstruction.
If ineffective, then shoot them down.
And we would say, we're the Americans.
Who the hell are you to threaten to shoot us down?
Well, take a look at the map, and you'll see why we shouldn't be there provoking.
And the problem is, in Washington, the attitude is: don't worry, the Chikoms are bluffing.
Don't worry, Putin's bluffing.
Well, they don't all bluff.
They're not all BSers like ours are.
And you could say, well, they should do what we tell them.
Well, why?
It's a South China Sea.
Why should they do what we tell them?
What benefit is it to us for Nancy Pelosi to go to Taiwan?
Does it help any of our lives?
Will anything improve?
And really, I mean, to paraphrase the late, great Congressman John Schmitz, and I know some of you know of him, maybe you don't, but Schmitz said this of Nixon, but I'll say it of Pelosi.
I have no objection to Pelosi going to Taiwan.
I only object to her coming back.
So the title of this little talk is Foreign Policy is Welfare for the Rich.
And I didn't say, as a lot of reformers will say in Washington and elsewhere, that foreign aid is welfare to the rich.
That's not good enough.
That's given.
That's a given.
That's old news.
Foreign policy itself is welfare for the rich and the well-connected.
We have to do away with it.
We have to do away with foreign policy.
And again, who benefits?
I did a kind of a random search of headlines that I want to read to you.
And this is just a random Google.
I didn't put a lot of effort into it intellectually.
I'd use a couple of keywords.
Who benefits from the 60 billion, which as I'll explain, it wasn't given.
It was made available to appropriate.
So basically, it's a slush fund sitting there.
And we've only, I think, appropriated some $8 or so billion so far.
So just chump change.
But here's just a couple of headlines.
Buoyed by Ukraine war, defense stocks escape worst of market slump.
LA Times, May 22, 2022.
20 members of Congress personally invest in top weapons contractors that'll profit from the just-passed $40 billion Ukraine package.
Business Insider, May 19th, 2022.
One of the nation's largest defense contractors just donated tens of thousands to lawmakers voting on defense legislation.
Business Insider, May 20, 2022.
Defense stocks are beating the SP 500 this year amid Ukraine war.
There's a shocker.
Bloomberg, May 27, 2022.
Next last one.
Here's why Raytheon's stock climbed 11.7% in the first half of 2022.
Gee, I wonder.
NASDAQ.com.
It's a miracle.
So this is a bipartisan foreign policy of global empire.
It's to provoke conflict and then take credit for the end of the conflict or solving the problems that you create, because Afghanistan did go so well after 20 years.
Libya is profitable.
In fact, Mises is going to hold its next summer school or its next university in Tripoli next year.
Why Conflict Is Profitable 00:00:58
So we'll all want to go ahead and apply for that.
The Syrian government had to be overthrown, so the U.S. armed al-Qaeda from the missiles it got from al-Qaeda in Libya.
So this is the kinds of people that the U.S. supports, and this is why the only conclusion, just as if with the Fed, to end it, we have to end foreign policy, and that should be our goal.
And the great Tom Lee DiLorenzo read a quote, and I was really happy to hear it from someone I think is one of the greatest libertarian writers, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the greatest libertarian writers of all time, Joe Sobrin.
And this is a quote some of you may know, but I think it's an appropriate finish for what I have to say.
If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.
If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist.
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